Does the fire burn? Does the serpent move? Does the skeletal horse gleam again? Three questions that have to be answered with “yes” before rehearsals commence for Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz on 17 June 2025.
While in the Festspielhaus rehearsals started yesterday for Georges Enescu’s Œdipe, the lake stage at Bregenz is a hive of activity of a different sort. Stage technology, scenery, safety procedures – everything must be ready when the lake stage reawakens on 17 June for Der Freischütz.
Magic on the water
A special moment in the opera is the famous scene in the Wolf’s Ravine, where the shady figure of Kaspar, accompanied by the young Max, ignites a circle of fire. To do this the performer, standing ankle-deep in the water, lights a torch – and suddenly a circle of fire blazes up around him. For this impressive effect to work on the opera’s opening night on 17 July 2025, stage hands with various specialisations gave the equipment a thorough checkup in May, inspecting every detail and testing every setting. By the end of a long day the question had been answered: even after the winter break the circle of fire still burned as it was supposed to – the magic worked.
A ghostly glimmer
It’s less about magic and more about craftsmanship in the festival’s new multi-purpose building. There, in the scene painting department new life is being breathed into another star of the Freischütz production: the skeletal horse. Without fog, lighting and music, the figure doesn’t seem so gruesome – if anything it looks a little lost, a motionless shadow of its former self. An initial assessment reveals that the joints require an “operation” and the bones need a lick of paint. The fine mesh on the knee joints is carefully restored and the animal gradually recovers its ghostly glimmer.
Safety first
“The patient can be brought down by rope now,” the event technician Max Neurauter calls out to his colleague in the sound department, Sonja Fitz. There’s nothing to worry about – they’re only running through safety procedures for an emergency. A training course on rescuing people from heights was held on the lake stage at the end of May, and stage technicians were able to practise controlled abseiling. A lot of lighting and audio equipment is installed as much as 14 metres above the surface of the stage. What if there’s a problem up there? The safety of everyone involved is the top priority on the lake stage – especially at dizzying heights. In case of emergency, every move has to be right, whether before or during a performance.
A soft hissing
Almost invisible and forgotten now – though by no means unimportant – is another star of the lake stage that needs to be reawakened: the giant serpent. Nine months long it slumbered motionless in the depths of the stage set. Now it’s being woken from its hibernation by control technician Stefan Frischke. Come summer, it will have to rear up three metres into the air and sink down again like clockwork at every performance – smoothly and without a hitch. How did the first tests go? “Super, flawless,” Frischke says. The snake will get regular exercise before the first night. Like everything else, the serpent must be in perfect working order when performances begin again on the lake stage.
Mysterious, eerie and spectacular
Gradually the lake stage, which in certain places has resembled a building site in recent months, is once again transformed into a world of illusions. Fire, water, smoke, movement: only when everything is right technically and the serpent, horse and fire appear at the correct moment can Der Freischütz fully weave its magic – mysterious, eerie and spectacular – when the production returns for its second run on 17 July. Until then there’s still plenty of hammering, oiling, painting and testing to do.
